[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: Emergent Behaviors spawnedfrom...]

[Damien Neil]

On 8/10/05, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
> "Damien Neil" <damien.neil at gmail.com> wrote:

>> It's not at all coincidental that players don't have an avatar in
>> The Sims.  There's a disconnect between them and the characters.
>> When a Sim gets a promotion, it's the Sim--not the player--that
>> has a new job.  The fun of the game comes not from advancing the
>> lives of the Sims, but from manipulating them.

> But YOU do advance in the Sims. As the family gains more money and
> becomes more successful, you gain access to more furniture to
> buy. When they have a kid, you have a new toy to play with. It's
> the same with something like Warcraft. When the Orcs overrun the
> human base and destroy the keep, THEY didn't win. YOU did. You
> could say the same thing about team sports - even though the
> football team did it completely without your involvement, WE won!
> Yay!

Children don't count, since you can just create them right at the
start.  No need to level up.

Money is a form of advancement in the Sims, but it's different than
a MMOG advancement treadmill--in particular, there isn't a strong
circular feedback loop.  (Why do you want to gain levels?  So you
can kill bigger mobs.  Why do you want to kill bigger mobs?  So you
can gain levels.)  After a certain point, you've got more money than
you need and you stop thinking about it.

> The problem with the Sims Online was that it was an unstructured
> social experience. It was a forum without moderators. And in
> forums without moderators, it's only a matter of time before
> someone posts goatse and ruins everybody's fun. If you read about
> SO, you'll find stories of a 13 year old girl playing a prostitute
> and a mafia that would extort protection money from other players
> using annoying, but ultimately non-violent meathods.

Did you play TSO?

I ask because this sounds very similar to, for example, stories
about teenaged Japanese girls who turn to prostitution to buy
expensive handbags--which may be true, but is a vanishingly rare
occurrence and of no use in describing what it's like to be in
Japan.  However because of the very rareness of the event, it's
shows up more in news reports than more mundane aspects of the
society.  (I also ask because I didn't play TSO, and am entirely
dependent on second hand descriptions of it--which I don't entirely
trust, for the above reason.)

Even assuming the above description of TSO's social ills is entirely
correct, I'd be inclined to blame that on a failure to give players
adequate social tools.  The technology of a social environment will
define interactions within it to a large degree.  For example,
traditional IRC's handling of moderation, where "ops" privileges are
lost whenever one disconnects and must be granted by another op when
you reconnect, is conducive to a very different social environment
than found in a chat system where moderation privileges persist
across sessions.

You can avoid the need for much moderation by giving players the
tools to moderate themselves.

> Developers need to start listening to the silent majority in these
> games.  Failure to do so is creating negative experiences for
> gamers and sending them away. There's plenty of "achievers" and
> "griefers" out there to keep something like World of Warcaft in
> business, but the Sims Online is certain proof that we need to
> revise our social models if we want to target, involve, and KEEP a
> different audience on any scale above a small cliquish group.

No, TSO's failure is certain proof that TSO failed.  Nothing more,
unless you can prove that changing the "social models" it used--and
nothing else--would have led to it succeeding.

                   - Damien
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